Protective body padding for use in athletics must meet a number of exacting requirements.
In the first place, it must be effective for the purpose intended and provide adequate protection for the type of impact expected from a particular sport or athletic activity. These impacts may vary from one sport to another, and are particularly extreme in the sport of hockey, where the hockey puck may be travelling at high speed when it hits the body of a player.
The body padding must also be light in weight, so that it does not interfere with the athletic ability of the player. The padding must also be as far as possible, of reasonable cost so that it is affordable and usable by all players, regardless of their financial position. It should be easily and securely attached to the body. It should be reusable many times over and capable of withstanding numerous high speed impacts without breaking down and loosing its padding effectiveness.
All of these requirements are fairly self-evident and are set out here merely as a background for the appreciation of the body padding according to the invention.
In the past, body padding has usually been made up of some kind of padding material which might in some cases simply be cotton batten, or hemp fibres, or other common natural padding materials. These materials would simply be stuffed into cavities in padding garments such as leg pads, waist pads, shoulder pads and the like. The pads themselves in the past have typically been made of cotton or other fabric materials, and in some cases leather has been used. However this increases the cost and weight of the padding, and also adds to the bulk without providing much additional protection.
More recently synthetic materials have been used. Nylon fabric materials have been used as the basis for constructing the padding garments, and synthetic plastic materials such as foam materials have been used in some case, enclosed within such nylon fabric garments. However, all of these prior padding systems have usually involved sewing as a means of fastening the outer materials together, and the padding has been to a considerable extent, liable to damage, such as cracking a folding and developing lines of weakness, if it is flexed around the body during use .
In some cases in an effort to overcome these cracking and folding problems, foam padding materials were used which were of two or three part laminate construction. Pads were cut out from sheets of foam material such as polyester or polyethylene or polyurethane foam, for example. Then, in order to hold these foam pads together, they would be laminated with injection molded or thermoformed shell like member of various shapes of harder plastic such as a polyethylene. The fabrication of these pads was labour intensive. The fabrication of the injection moulded shaped shells was costly, and the end result was relatively heavy and not a totally effective form of padding. Especially, the use of hard shells formed of injection moulded plastic was liable to suffer damage as a result of heavy impacts of small objects such as a hockey puck. Once the outer shell was broken, the padding efficiency of the garment was drastically reduced and it would have to be either repaired by replacing the padding or simply replaced altogether. Furthermore the use of rigid shells imposed restrictions on the design of the padding. Clearly if the shell was too extensive it would substantially interfere with the mobility of the wearer. Consequently there had restrictions placed on the size and extent of the hard shell. This could in some cases leave parts of the body unprotected
In order to make these systems effective, it was necessary for manufacturers to resort to more and more expensive materials and more and more expensive manufacturing techniques, so that the cost of such pads became a very significant factor in the cost of participation in a sport or athletic activity, and the bulk and weight was inconvenient.